Blink and you miss it

-
That refers to the week.  This one has flown by in a flurry.  Crystal went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival on Monday and I did on Tuesday.  This has become or model for this event - men go one night, women the other.  It makes the childcare arrangements simple.  The Film Festival is our annual goggle-fest.  There are about 10 films shown normally covering skiing, biking, climbing, paddling and over loosely mountain related pursuits.  It's really good and inspires dreaming if nothing else.  In fact last year it featured a guy who spent his 35th birthday climbing 35 routes in a day.  I racked my brain to come up with a suitably related challenge that could take place on or around Feb 8th every year and settled on what was last year a 36km cross country ski.  We came up a few k short last year but I'm already planning to repeat (+1k) this year.  I have decided that if I am still doing this in my 70s I will split it across two days of the weekend.  No doubt, if I am living in Ottawa, global warming will have morphed this into a run.

Daddy daycare has been quiet.  The more time we spend at home the more I feel that the kids are happy here.  Felicity went to her "preschool" on Monday with friend Cedar and seems to love that, coming home wired and exhausted but full of brainergy.  But the collective stress of getting them both dressed in this weather and out the door seems to make them both grouchy when we go out together and we are limited in where we can go without the car.  Standing at the bus stop when it's -20C is not a great option.  Moreover, they are playing increasingly well together and Felicity's imagination is on fire.  She will relate a picnic outing to the beach for an entire hour and rarely seems to be short of ideas.  Besides, if we went out too much we would miss the tree trimming man and his go-go-gadget arm truck.

I make it sound like we never leave the house.  In fact we rarely don't leave the house for something or other.  On Wednesday Crystal was home ill so I took Felicity swimming while Toby napped which was great because I don't often get to do something 1:1 with her.  Tuesday we all went to the library and today we did some groceries.


When the sun is shining, low as it is at this time of year and reflecting off the snow, the house is really bright, the sunroom is warm and it almost feels like being in a cabin.  Quite lovely.


Felicity has taken Toby's shirt shoulder off so that she can give him a flu shot.  She will also take his blood pressure, listen to his chest and check for puppies in his ears.  Marvellous.


Tonight I am off out for my weekly turn flooding the rink.  It's enjoyable but a late night.  Oh so old and grumpy.  News flash!  Flooding may be called off due to snow.  In the UK being a grumpy old man is a badge of honour, something of a recognised life phase and not something to be apologised for and changed.  Here, in North America, it is deemed to be negativity and you have to go see the shrink.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Alpine cycling adventure - Part II

-
Image
Day 6 - Barcelonnette to St Dalmas, 123 km (76 mi) Cols passed: Col de Cayolle (2326 m), Col de la Couillole (1678 m) Despite the brooding skies we left Barcelonnette cheered by dry shorts, confidence that we were within touching distance of our goal and enjoying the atmospheric effect of the wispy mist, high clouds and soft sunlight. Our hopes for the newly adapted route were met and surpassed as we wound our way up a stunning gorge towards Col de Cayolle. Despite a brief hailstorm as we approached the col we stayed dry and enjoyed a pit-stop and blankets amongst the snow pack on the col before negotiating over 1500 m of patchy wet descent to Guillames at 793 m. The high Alps now behind us we climbed back up through the ski resort of Valberg and on to the Col de la Couillole up at 1678 m and rolled back down to 500 m where we expected to spend the night. Our ever-supportive support team had other ideas however and let us know by way of text message that they had found a fantastic ca...
Read more

Rafting the Rio Maipo

-
Image
  Feb 5th -  Sometimes travelling is hard, and I have moaned a bit about how covid has made everything harder. But sometimes it's just pure fun.  Not to say that everything about our day out rafting was plain sailing. To begin with we had to get everyone on board (have you ever noticed how many of our idioms come from nautical activities? Ask me sometime about freezing the balls off a brass monkey...).  I enjoyed the water as a kid but I never went white water rafting until I was a fully grown person. I can see how it could be intimidating. We found Natexplora who said they ran kids trips and that was enough to sway the doubters. The fact that we ran the same route as the other six adult-only rafts on our trip was fortunately lost in the joy and thrill of the moment. There is a project to divert water from the Maipo through a hydroelectric tunnel. Apparently, this will reduce the flow of Maipo by 90%. We had heard of this scheme, and we saw these signs, although the ...
Read more

10 December days in England

-
Image
Swiss air brought us to England (Apologies for the formatting issues). My six oldest friends live in England, within around 20 miles of each other, along with their six partners and 14 children.  We haven't been to England in the winter in nearly a decade. It was unsurpsingly grey and somewhat surprisingly very dark, very early.  Ottawa is on the same latitude as Rome.  Our "true North" is suprisingly far south.  All of this English gloom was no equal to the congenial cheer that was in full flow in the run up to Christmas - the sunshine of friendship radiating through the pale fog.  We had a very smooth taxi-bus-plane-taxi trip from Chamonix back to Woking and were settled just in time to wave our generous hosts, Nick and Agnes, off to London for their Van Gogh and Shard dinner engagements to celebrate the anniversary of their first date.  We were comfortably house bound for the first couple of days awaiting what else but a covid test result.  When it...
Read more